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We are familiar with the names of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World, compiled by Greek writer, Antipater, who lived in the second
century. Several writers have written on the greatest monuments, but
Antipater settled on seven because it is a number considered magical
by the Greeks.
According to the list compiled, the Seven Wonders are: The Pyramids
of Egypt; the Colossus of Rhodes (a statue of the sun god Helios,
located at the mouth of the Rhodes harbor); The Hanging Gardens of
Babylon; The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor; the world’s
first known lighthouse The Pharos of Alexandria; The Statue of Zeus
at Olympia and the Temple of Artemis in Asia Minor.
Some later writers compiled lists of
wonders that are truly marvels of architecture. Many of these
writers have included in their list an island in south-eastern
Pacific. What is this island and why does it warrant a place in the
special listing of wonders? |
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A Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeven sighted a lone speck of land in the
south-eastern part of the Pacific. Since he discovered the land on
Easter Day in the year 1722, he named it Easter Island. The island
made news because, apart from being a lonely land far out in the
sea, it also housed several giant sized statues, numbering more than
one thousand. These statues are scattered all over the island.
Debate on the origin of the island and the statues have been going
on since the last two hundred years.
Giant sized statues found on the Easter Island
Views of different people
Initially, many scholars concluded that the statues would have been
those of Polynesian gods or chiefs. The Polynesians were a community
of people who reached the island two thousand years ago. The
scholars also concluded that the statues must have been made before
the year 1650, when there was a civil war in the island. Another
conclusion drawn by the early scholars was that the Polynesians had
come to Easter Island from the east. This was disproved by a
Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in the year 1947, when he sailed a
raft from Peru to the Tuamoto archipelago, located to the west of
Easter Island.
Whether the statues were of gods or chiefs and whether the
Polynesians came from the east or west is beyond the point. What is
important is that the statues were all astonishingly huge. Many of
them weighed twenty tones, the largest weighing ninety tones. The
scholars believed that the statues used to stand upright on stone
temple platforms or huas.
Interesting experiments
Later on, in the year 1956, Heyerdahl revisited the island to
conduct experiments and find out what he could about the statues.
Firstly, he probably wanted to know how long it would have taken to
create each of these statues. He hired six natives to rough out the
front of a statue on a quarry in three sides, using only stone
tools. After the experiment, they concluded that the time taken to
complete and polish a free-standing statue would have been at least
a year. In the second experiment, Heyerdahl tried to get a statue to
stand on its hua by constructing a platform under the stomach
of the prone figure and levering it with two huge trees, each five
meters tall. The natives told the explorer that wooden sledges were
used to transport the statues. It sounded plausible to Heyerdahl
since the island had once been thickly forested. Although, the
experiments did not throw any conclusive light on the creation and
the transportation of the statues, the explorer could draw out some
plausible theories to the mystery of the giant statues. |
